


the lonely

by ang3lba3



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/F, Happy Ending, POV Kanaya Maryam, Vampire Kanaya, grimdark Rose - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:10:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7495116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ang3lba3/pseuds/ang3lba3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world turns a girl's green eyes jade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lonely

**Author's Note:**

> For Rose's Grimdark speech, hover your mouse over it and the translation will appear.
> 
> I started this quite a while back, but just now completed it, as a warm up while working on ladystuck. someone save me, it's so much longer than i thought it would be,,,
> 
> on tumblr at [this gorgeous blog ;)](ang3lba3.tumblr.com)

The thing is not rotting, but it is hungry, and it wears your crush's face.

What was once a girl ceases to be anything when you jam the thorned steel of a decorative rose through her clouded eye. She falls to the floor with a dull thud, her frame thin and shriveled with the exception of her bulging stomach. You try not to think about what it's bulging with.

 _(Who_ it's bulging with.)

Behind you, something grabs your ankle, and you kick it off with extreme prejudice, stumbling away as ungracefully as you've ever done anything in your life. It's Eridan.

Or it's what used to be Eridan, anyways.

You cut him in half just twenty minutes ago, and had somehow expected that severing his spinal cord would leave him unable to come after you. Instead, there's a dragging bread crumb trail of intestines and viscera from the end of his torso that must go back the thirty yards to where you'd killed him. Your breaths feel frantic and harsh as you watch him claw himself through the dirt the scant feet towards you.

"Fuck," you say, shivering all over.

You throw up, and while you're heaving he reaches you, and the pitchfork that you shove into the back of his skull does nothing to change the fact that he'd reached you mouth first this time.

-

Waiting to die is cowardly, and you're far from that, so you fall heart first onto the scimitar that had been sheathed at Vriska's side.

You don't quite make it, impale yourself through the gut instead, must nick a lung somehow because you die choking on your own blood with a frothy pink foam bubbling from your mouth.

-

You wake up with a harsh gasp and something wrong with your stomach. There's something - there's something in you, and you're not thinking very clearly, but you know it shouldn't be there so you pull it out. There's a squelch and a pressure that makes you feel like being sick, but then it's gone and you're staring at the ceiling of your gardening shed.

How long you lay there is anybody's estimate. There's the strangest pain coming from your abdomen, but something tells you not to look, even if you'd had the strength to lift your head. Finally, you recognize it.

_Hunger._

You take a sharp breath through your nose at that realization, and find the strength in trembling limbs to pick yourself up. There's a breeze, and it goes right through you.

Literally.

You look down, and scream, because that sure is a - if not very big - hole through your body. It takes you several long, frantic moments to realize that it's not bleeding. That when you wipe the blood away the skin is healed and leaves behind a perfect slit. That when you press a finger in, there is no squelch, there is only the unnatural smoothness of scar tissue.

Fuck.

You roll onto your hands and knees and vomit, but nothing comes up and it's just pointless dry heaves through the crippling hunger of your stomach. Crouching back when you think you're done and careful not to touch the slit in your torso, you press your bloody palms to your eyes to block out the world without thinking about it and oh.

Oh, fuck.

You're so hungry, and your hands smell _so good_ , and you're licking them before you think it through. You've never tasted anything as delicious, thick and salty and metallic on your tongue. You fall into a sort of daze, come back to yourself sated and slow with your face buried against Eridan's neck.

There's no pretending what just happened didn't happen, but you feel  _full_  and you can't care.

-

You've read Twilight, you've read the Vampire Diaries, you've read Vampire Academy and Bloodlines, you've read every dime a dozen bodice ripping neck biter vampire novel and yet.

Nothing could prepare you for the reality.

The reality is that you were bitten by a zombie, and you became a vampire. The reality is that you tie a tight sash around your waist, because your top will get caught in your body and ruin the lines of your clothing. The reality is that your teeth are razors in your own mouth. The reality is that the dead ignore you because you are one of them. The reality is that you haven't seen a human since you died, and that you're not sure what you'd do if you did.

-

You wander.

Your town is very small, and it takes less than a month to work your way through the deceased population. It takes a week to get bored. There are only so many ways you can kill time without the internet and a town library the size of a closet. It's with very little regret that you find the sturdiest truck in town (to zero surprise you discover it belongs to Equius' father), pack the back with supplies, and head for nowhere in particular.

You're not sure if your chances of finding alive people would be better or worse in more (previously) heavily populated areas, and you're not sure if you _want_ to find survivors. Some part of you fears that you'll become nothing more than a ravenous beast when exposed to - pardon the expression - fresh meat.

It turns out to not be an issue, because there is no one.

No one but the dead.

And even they are becoming deader. More and more often you see bodies that, although occasionally twitching, have been worn down by the elements too thoroughly to still move. It was never a disease meant to last, you realize. It didn't have to - tsunamis don't need to last to rip the world apart. All they have to do is destroy anything in their path until they run out of energy.

-

The world smells of rot, to the point where you'd be gagging if you hadn't become so used to it. You can never truly get used to the smell of thousands of decomposing bodies, of course. But your stomach grows wise in hunger - such a rare thing to hear, when was the last time bodily impulses made someone _wise_ \- and begins to know better than to upchuck solid food.

Good food has been a problem lately.

The corpses are too putrid for you to even think about touching. Or, correction: the corpses are too putrid for you to even think about touching again.

You've tried hunting, but you're abysmal at it. Despite growing up in the country, you'd never taken an interest in killing your own meat. Why, when you lived in a civilization that provided meat for you?

(This.)

(This _exact reason_ was why.)

Canned goods that you find in grocery stores and in people's pantries aren't bad, exactly, they still taste fairly good. It fuels your body, but does nothing to satisfy your true hungers.

-

Over the past three months you've found yourself drifting deeper and deeper into the countryside. Your truck is fully capable of holding enough supplies to indulge any trips of fancy you want, and a map ensures that you don't get too far from a gas station at any given point in time.  
  
You stop in a little town with an even littler museum. It's six months in, and the corpses are little more than skeletons now. Stepping around the bones is more nonchalant than you ever could have imagined.

It has a rack of flyers with local sites - a waterfall, a beautiful Catholic shrine dating back to the settlers of the town, and an invitation.

Your eyes skip over it at first, but then jerk back to it. You pick it up, brows knitted, and inspect it.

It's a tasteful lavender, with flowing dark purple script and gold accents. It takes you a long moment to realize that the beautiful calligraphy was done by hand.

"If you can read this," you say out loud, fingers tracing the words as you speak, "then you are cordially invited by one Rose Lalonde to a tea party for survivors of the end of the world. Dated: September of 2017."

Your hands spasm, crinkling the paper.

There was very little practical reason to keep track of the time now, but you did it regardless, and today was the 3rd of September.

On the back of the invitation there's a map, and it occurs to you halfway there as the woods get thicker and the roads become gravel and then dirt that this could be a trap. It could be some lure, to steal your supplies and murder you.

Dying at the hands of another person would be infinitely preferable to never seeing another person at all, you decide.

-

Your first impression of the house, if it had been six months ago, would have been awe.

But the end of the world makes a girl's green eyes turn jade.

There's only so much time that you can spend in your truck, hands gripping the steering wheel until brown knuckles turn white, before you have to get out and head for the door. You have the sense that you're being observed, but there's nothing you can do about that and _of course you are._ Rose Lalonde invited you to her home, and the end of the world doesn't have much TV.

You take deep breaths, stare at yourself in the flip down mirror. What stares back isn't encouraging.

Worn down features, prematurely wrinkling from stress with frown lines around chapped, pressed thin lips. You haven't bothered to use makeup in a very long time, but you find yourself reaching to the glove compartment now, stopping yourself at the last second. She knows you're here. She's likely watching you out a window. You don't want to have her see you trying to look beautiful, the socially ingrained instinct that beauty should be 'natural' and not induced festering deep in your chest.

You adjust the headscarf that hides your greasy black hair, press your palms to your closed eyelids, then step out of the truck. At 6"4, you're tall enough not to need to hop.

Before you've got both feet on the ground, there's the crack of a stick behind you, and you spin, arms raised in defense, sharp teeth bared reflexively.

A girl stands before you, not as tall as you (few are) but still tall. Her hair is the color of snow, her skin gray, and her eyes glow with an unnatural burning ivory energy. When she opens her mouth to speak, nothing intelligible pours out, but you understand her from the voice that echoes inside your mind.

 **"Upi str mpy kolr yjr pyjrtd,"** she says, and you shiver, step closer.

What you should be feeling is fear.

What you are feeling is relief.

"Neither are you," you say, and hold out a hand. To shake, or to hold, you're not sure. When her skin touches yours it is so cold it almost burns.

You never want to let go.

 **"Yjrm fpm'y,"** Rose Lalonde says, and for the first time in weeks, you smile.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr at [this gorgeous blog ;)](ang3lba3.tumblr.com)


End file.
